Uses for Mushrooms Outside our Dinner Plate

Upon having found out that I have been paired with Ecovative, I was very excited and could not wait until I began. Typing in their website on the search bar, I was taken to their home page and there, I just started reading everything I could about the company.

Did you know that approximately 20 billion dollars of Styrofoam is created each year? It has been found that this very harmful product makes up 25% of our landfills and there they stay for thousands of years. According to Eben Bayer, the co-founder of Ecovative, a cube of Styrofoam is equivalent to a liter and a half of petrol. Thus, every year, each person is literally throwing away huge amounts of energy in the trash. Now if petrol, which is used to power almost everything around us, were unlimited, this maybe would not be that egregious of a crime. However, there is only a finite amount of petrol and this is where Ecovative fits in the big picture. It has been long known to everyone who has taken the required Bio-101 during their high-school years that fungi are decomposers that play a big role in the recycling process. Those at Ecovative have found and been able to use the vegetative part of the mushroom, mycelium, to create most of their products to-date. Due to the fact that mycelium takes things we would consider waste and transform them into an adhesive polymer, Ecovative has been able to use it as a glue to create all sorts of foam-like materials for packaging and insulation. Having started from what others thought was a crazy idea, founders Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre have truly started from the bottom and reached the top. Composed of with a team of engineers, scientists, product designers and more, Ecovative has worked and continues to work with an industry and consumers to “rid the world of toxic, unsustainable materials” for the betterment of not only the Earth, but also us humans as well.

reference: http://www.ted.com/talks/eben_bayer_are_mushrooms_the_new_plastic.html;
http://www.ecovativedesign.com/

The Beginning of the End: Senior Year Internship

Due to the fact that last year was such a rewarding experience in which I truly gained so much knowledge about working in labs, this year, I am all the more excited to partake in an internship. I really hope to learn many more skills that would help me in college—especially because I am looking into the science field. Last year, for the most part, I was given the task of calculations or in other words, figuring out how much of what solutions was needed. In addition, because of the fact that my particular internship (about DNA and RNA isolation) had many places for error, it was not altogether uncommon for the machine to malfunction and prevent my mentor and I from seeing the final results. Consequently, this year I would like to participate in experiments in which I get to do something from the start to the finish and then have the chance to thoroughly analyze the results. It would be all the more amazing if I could get the chance to form my own experiment and carry it straight through till the end. All in all, this year, I am simply just looking forward to further discovering and developing my lab expertise.